City & County Jails in North Carolina
North Carolina - Inmate Search - All County Jail Rosters
Clicking on any of the North Carolina Counties or Cities below will direct you to a list of all the City Jails, County Jails and Juvenile Detention Centers in that specific County.
Search for any jail in North Carolina
North Carolina county jails and state prisons
North Carolina has 100 counties. The sheriff runs the jail. Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford, and Forsyth have the beds. A mountain county or a county on the Inner Banks may have one small jail and send overflow to a neighbor. City police departments have holding rooms. They are not county jails.
Jails in North Carolina hold people before trial and people serving a misdemeanor. A sentence of a year or less stays with the sheriff. A felony sentence goes to the Department of Adult Correction. A federal sentence goes to the Bureau of Prisons. FCI Butner is the federal complex in the state.
In January 2026 the department told legislators it was running 55 prisons and two confinement-in-response-to-violation centers, with a population a little over 32,000. The count at the end of 2025 was 32,105, up 627 from the year before, while filled officer jobs fell. Staffing had already taken 4,281 beds offline. The prisons families ask about include Central Prison in Raleigh, Maury, Bertie, Scotland, Tabor, Neuse, and Eastern. Women are held at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh. These are not extra county jails.
How many county jails are there in North Carolina?
Most of the 100 counties operate a jail. A few share a regional building. When a jail holds someone for another county, for the state, or for the U.S. Marshals, it bills a daily rate. Mecklenburg and Wake account for a large share of the beds. A full jail in the mountains means a transfer down the highway.
How many juvenile detention centers are there in North Carolina?
Detention and commitment are different stops. The state operates nine juvenile detention centers, two of them on the same campus as a youth development center. It also monitors three county-run detention centers. Alexander Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Taylorsville is a 24-bed state center. Cabarrus, in Concord, is a 94-bed complex shared with the Cabarrus Youth Development Center. A youth in a detention center is usually waiting on a hearing.
A commitment goes to a youth development center. Those are not the county jails, and they are not the same as the detention beds. Search the county of the arrest. The listing shows the detention center that county uses, and a youth development center only if the youth has been committed.
What the first days in a North Carolina county jail are like
Booking in Mecklenburg or Wake is a long floor. Identity, prints, a medical screen, a search, clothes bagged, one call if the phones are up. The person has not been convicted. There is no phone in the cell, and no way to know if a shift at a warehouse, a car in a deck, or the kids are covered. Glasses stay in property until someone signs for them.
Summer sits on the building. The uniform does not fit. The bunk is thin, and the next bed is awake. Meals are plain and on a clock. Mail is slow. A visit from the mountains to a Piedmont jail is a drive that may not happen. Withdrawal from alcohol, opioids, or methamphetamine can start before the first appearance, and the night is when that gets loud. Deputies who apply the rules the same way to everyone run a quieter pod. Uneven rules are how contraband moves. Mecklenburg and Wake can separate by risk. A small mountain jail often cannot, and a full jail there means a transfer.
Tablets, video visits, and deposits take some of the isolation out of the larger jails. A message home does not fix the bed or the case, and the account can be shut off. Each county page on this site lists the jail phone, the vendor, and the way to send money for that sheriff’s office.